Billionaires, Bad Boys, and Alpha Males (205 page)

“I have to go,” Kenley said.
 
“I’ll call you when I get to the
airport.”

She grabbed her coat off the bed and shrugged
it on.
 
She took one last look
around, then grabbed her suitcase, and strolled out of the apartment. With any
luck, she would never have to see Chad Parnell again.

Chapter
Twelve

“Jesus,” Jay said when he opened his apartment
door and saw Chad.
 
“What the hell
happened to you?
 
You look
horrible.”

“Thanks,” Chad said.
 
“That’s exactly what I needed to hear
right now.
 
I know you’re an
asshole, Havens, but you could at least pretend to be nice to me in my moment
of need.”
 
He walked into the
apartment, took his coat off, and then plopped himself down on Jay’s
couch.
 
It was a soft yellow sofa.
 
Alyssa must have picked it out.
 
Up until recently, Jay had never bought
anything except brown leather.
 
What
the hell was happening to the two of them? Chad wondered.
 
He began to feel panicked at the thought
of a yellow sofa ending up in his apartment.
 

“Where’s Alyssa?” he asked Jay.
 
“Do you want to get out of here?
 
We could go to a strip club, we could
–“

“A strip club?” Alyssa laughed as she came into
the room.
 
“Jesus, Chad, you’ve got
it bad.”
 
She exchanged a knowing
look with her fiancé.

“No, I don’t!” Chad protested.
 
“I just said I wanted to go to a strip
club.”“You said you wanted to go to a strip club because you’re trying to
convince yourself that you don’t love Kenley,” Alyssa said.
 
She sat down on the other couch next to
Jay, turning herself so that her legs were across Jay’s lap.

Jay nodded.
 
“It’s true,” he said.
 
“You’re thinking that if you can find
another girl, any girl, you’ll forget about Kenley.”

 
“Of
course I would forget about Kenley!”
 
Chad said.
 
Well.
 
That wasn’t completely true.
 
He’d never had the kind of sex he’d had
with Kenley, so it was unlikely that he’d just be able to go out and find some
woman that would measure up.
 
But it
would come close.
 
Wouldn’t it? He
tried to think about naked girls, naked
strippers
even, and was surprised to find that he had no desire to think about anyone
but Kenley.

“No,” Jay shook his head sadly.
 
“You won’t forget about her.”

“I won’t?”

“No.”

“Then what do I do?”

Jay and Alyssa looked at each other again, that
same worried look, like Chad was their child or something, and they were going
to have to do some tough parenting.
 
“Well,” Alyssa said slowly.
 
“What did she say when you told her you wanted her to stay?”

“To stay?”

“Yeah,” Jay said.
 
He reached over and took a carrot off
the veggie tray that was sitting on the coffee table and popped it in his
mouth.
 
“What were her reasons for
not wanting to?”

“I didn’t ask her to stay,” Chad said,
wondering how Jay could eat at a time like this.
 
You’d think he would have been a little
more sympathetic to the fact that his best friend’s life was falling apart.

“What do you mean you didn’t ask her to stay?”
Jay asked, frowning.

“I mean I didn’t ask her to stay.
 
Why would I have done that?”

“Um, because you wanted her to stay?” Alyssa
asked.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t going to put myself out
there.”
 
Chad shook his head.
 
“I mean, what if she said no?”

“So let me get this straight,” Jay said.
 
“You slept with her, then paraded her in
front of the paparazzi, then never asked her once to stay?”

“Right.”

“No wonder she’s pissed!” Alyssa said.

“Well, yeah, when you put it like that, of
course it seems like she has a right to be mad.
 
But you didn’t see her this morning, you
didn’t see the way she was acting, flouncing all around like she wanted to get
the hell out of New York.”
 
Chad waved
his hands around in what he hoped was a good imitation of the flouncing.

“And you believed her?” Alyssa asked.
 
She reached over the coffee table and
thunked Chad on the back of the head.
 
“You’re hopeless, no wonder you’ve made such a big mess of this.”

“Of course she wanted you to ask her to stay,”
Jay said.
 
“She was just pretending
that she didn’t.”

“I don’t think so,” Chad said, shaking his
head. “She was really going out of her way to make it clear.
 
You should have seen her twirling around
in the lobby of the Parker Meridien.”

Alyssa rolled her eyes.
 
“She was trying to prove to you, and
probably to herself, that she didn’t need you,” she said.
 
“Women do stuff like that all the time.”

“They do?”

“Yes,” Alyssa said.
 
“And men are supposed to have the balls
to call them on it, to tell us how they really feel so that we can stop.”

“Is that true?” Chad asked Jay, blinking in
wonderment.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Jay said, and sighed.

“So I’m supposed to go and tell her how I
feel?
 
That doesn’t seem fair.”
 
Chad shook his head.
 
“I’m not going to put myself out there
if she doesn’t want to do the same.”

“Well, that’s your decision,” Jay said.
 
He looked at Alyssa again, and then
turned his gaze back to Chad.
 
“But
you have to ask yourself what’s worse – having her leave, with no chance
of her ever coming back, or risking telling her how you feel if it means
there’s a chance she might stay.”

Chad thought about how it would feel for Kenley
to be gone, to walk out of his life forever.
 
He stomach clenched and his heart
stopped in his chest.
 
And that’s
when he knew what he had to do.
 

“Thanks,” he said to Jay and Alyssa as he
grabbed his jacket and headed for the door.

“No problem man,” Jay said.
 
“Let me know how it turns out.”

But Chad was already halfway out the door.

***

When Chad got back to his apartment, Kenley was
gone.
 
He knocked on the guest room
door, but even before he did, he knew she wasn’t in there.
 
There was a stillness, an emptiness in
the apartment that let him know she’d left. He opened the door to her bedroom,
praying that her stuff would still be there.
 
But it wasn’t.
 
Everything was gone.
 
Her clothes.
 
Her suitcase.
 
Her computer.

Shit.
 
He ran his hands through his hair.
 
So that was it, he thought.
 
She wouldn’t have left like that, without even saying goodbye, if she
cared about him even a little bit.
 
There was no way. Despite what Jay and Alyssa had said, it just didn’t
make sense.

He sighed, then walked into the kitchen.
 
He sat down at the breakfast bar and put
his head in his hands.
 
He didn’t
know what to do.
 
Should he call
her?
 
He dialed her phone, but it
went right to voicemail, further cementing the idea that Kenley didn’t want
anything to do with him.
 
The
thought was like a knife to his heart.

And then he saw it.
 
The check, still sitting there on the
counter.
 
She hadn’t taken it.
 
She hadn’t taken his money!
 
Which meant obviously last night had
meant something to her.
 

Hope rose up in his heart.
 
He had to find her.
 
But where would she have gone?
 
A hotel?
 
No, Chad decided.
 
She’d want to go home.
 
She’d probably changed her flight.
 
And before he even realized what he was
doing, he was flying out the door of his apartment, praying to God that he
could catch her.

***

The woman at the ticket counter was starting to
piss Kenley off.

“No, you don’t understand,” Kenley said for the
third time.
 
“I want to change my
ticket, not start a whole new ticket.”

“But you’re not the one who bought this
ticket,” the woman said, looking down at it with a confused look on her
face.
 
“So how can you change it?”

“I didn’t buy the ticket,” Kenley said.
 
“But I
am
the passenger.”
 
She
tapped her nail against the paper where her name was printed.
 
“ And I know for a fact that the
passenger can change their ticket without being the one who bought it, because
I’ve done it before.”
 

It was true, too.
 
One time a few years ago Kenley and
Melissa had gone on vacation with their mom to California.
 
Kenley and Melissa had decided to come
back a day early because Melissa had gotten into a fight with their mom,
something about how she’d never supported her dreams of being an actress, which
was kind of ridiculous since Melissa had never even ---

“Fine,” the woman said, sighing like Kenley was
really ruining her day.
 
“But I’ll
have to get a supervisor.”

“Thank you,” Kenley said, not really meaning
it.
 
She hated when she had to thank
people just for doing their jobs.
 

“So if you’ll just step aside, then…”

“I’ll wait right here,” Kenley said
firmly.
 
She knew all about stepping
aside.
 
Once you stepped aside, you
were done.
 
You ended up waiting
there forever, missing your flight, getting angrier and angrier, only to end up
being told that there was nothing they could do for you anyway.

“Ma’am,” the woman said, sighing.
 
“I can’t have you holding up – “

“Kenley.”

She turned around.
 
It was Chad.
 
He was standing there, behind her,
looking a little out of breath.
 
His
hands were shoved in his pockets, and he had a sheepish look on his face.

“What are you doing here?” she blurted.
 
Her heart leapt at the sight of him,
that he was there, that she was seeing him again when she had thought that she
would never see him again.

“I came to get you.”
 
He took a step toward her.
 
The ticket agent’s mouth dropped open as
she took in the scene in front of her.

“Yeah, well, I’m kind of in the middle of
something.”
 
She turned her back on
him, needing all her willpower to do it.

“I need to talk to you.”
 
His voice was strong, commanding.
 
She felt herself weakening, wanting to
say yes, to hear what he had to say, to hope that maybe he was going to beg her
not to go. But no.
 
She wasn’t
falling for that again.

“Chad,” she said.
 
“Please go away.”

“No.”

“Chad,” she whispered, turning to him.
 
“Stop, you’re going to wreck
everything.”
 
Was he stupid?
 
Didn’t he know that if something
happened at the airport, in public, with people watching them, that the word might
get out that she wasn’t really his girlfriend?
 
He hadn’t signed the deal yet, probably
wouldn’t until tomorrow or the next day.
 
Their pictures were already on the internet, all they needed to do was
lay low until he signed.
 
A big
airport fight might blow their cover.
 
Already people were starting to stare.

“Fuck the endorsement deal,” Chad said loudly.